Building Software to Change the World
In the case of Simple Support, necessity truly was the mother of invention. I needed to keep track of my trouble tickets, and I needed a simpler tool to do it with. Yes, I am going to sell it as a service, but there was more complex calculus done in determining the features besides the need to make a buck.
I could inundate you with a blizzard of facts and figures about the rise of the freelance economy. If you are reading this article, I’m going to assume you’re well aware of this trend. What you may not know is that there is actually a global community of freelance professionals unbound by a conventional work life. Since they are not tied to a physical location, these people have managed to engineer lives rich with travel, exploration, and personal discovery.
Take my acquaintance Matt for instance. He works as a network security professional. Sounds pretty routine except he does his work for global clients while traveling and living all over Southeast Asia as an American ex-pat. He charges American rates while living in a place where rent is $50 a month for a nice apartment. He and his girlfriend travel all over Asia, rarely spending too much time in any one place, and he hardly ever returns to the U.S. He’s not a big Facebooker, so there aren’t pictures of their travels and experiences splashed all over social media, but I can imagine.
While this way of life isn’t for everybody, I personally consider it vastly preferable to shuffling to an office every day for 14 days of PTO a year that you probably won’t take anyway. This need to escape the rat race and actually live your life is what drives me to create something that will enable this lifestyle.
I’m not a powerful man. I’m not rich nor am I a politician. I write okay, but I have no personal charisma in person. I’m happy to throw Molotov cocktails, but I won’t be leading the revolution. What I can do is write software and finance software projects.
By building software that enables people to break the chains that tie them down to a specific place, I’m doing my small part to make remote work the norm instead of the exception.
